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Monday, December 18, 2006

Blair is just making things worse for Labour

Writing in this morning's Guardian, Jackie Ashley makes the point that the longer Tony Blair tries to drag out his increasingly discredited premiership, the worse it gets both for him and for the Labour Party.

Following the shameful events of last Thursday, I came to a similar conclusion in my weekend columns and podcast which has gone live today.

"The man who promised to clean up politics continues to sully it beyond anything achieved by John Major’s administration. Until the day he finally goes, his capacity to damage both the Labour Party and the reputation of British politics in general will remain unhindered."

2 comments:

Yes, it's a regular feature. I have been doing the podcast weekly since last December and I'm now on the 48th episode. I don't make a huge song and dance about it, but it is in fact now the longest-running regular political podcast in the UK.

"He saw politics very much like Trollope, as the interplay of personalities seeking preferment, rather than, like me, as a conflict of principles and programmes about social and economic change."

Denis Healey, writing about Roy Jenkins in "The Time of My Life."

"I'll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with a series of far-fetched resolutions, and these are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code. And you go through the years sticking to that, outdated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council, a Labour council, hiring taxis to scuttle round the city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers. I'll tell you - and you'll listen - you can't play politics with people's jobs and with people's homes and with people's services."

Neil Kinnock, Bournemouth 1985

"But the most eloquent message concerns the Blair government. It must be right at all times. Above all, the integrity of the leader can never be challenged. He never did hype up intelligence. He didn't take Britain to war on any other than the stated terms. Any suggestion of half-truth, or disguised intention, or concealed Bushite promises is the most disgraceful imaginable charge that deserves a state response that knows no limit.

"That's how a sideshow came to take over national life. Now it seems to have taken a wretched, guiltless man's life with it. Such is the dynamic that can be unleashed by a leader who believes his own reputation to be the core value his country must defend."

Hugo Young, on the death of Dr David Kelly, 2003

"The socialism I believe in is everyone working for each other, everyone having a share of the rewards. It's the way I see football, the way I see life."